Walls are contentious as of late. They have been in use historically. One, Hadrian’s Wall, defined a geographical limit to the Roman Empire. The Berlin Wall and the snipers posted on it kept East Germans from a taste of freedom. There are other walls in place or planned to keep unwanted immigrants from moving to places like Hungary, Slovenia, and elsewhere in the EU.
There are calls for a wall to keep people from crossing into the United States illegally. Demands for walls and barbed wire are growing worldwide. Sad, but nothing new.
Back in 1979, while a naive young man, I proposed a national memorial engraved with the names of the American fallen from the Vietnam War. Miraculously, in 1982, what is now known to some as The Wall was built and dedicated near the Lincoln Memorial. Veterans make a journey to this majestic work of architecture — like the faithful to Mecca or the Western Wall in Jerusalem — to find solace and to honor friends who are forever young.
This wall was built to bring people together after the divisive Vietnam War. Those who supported the effort included people who took different sides on the war, such as Gen. William Westmoreland on one side and the dovish Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., on the other.
My planning behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was influenced by the thinking of Austrian psychiatrist Carl Jung. His writings on societal archetypes and collective unconscious led me to believe the focus on a memorial with names of the fallen would gain wide acceptance. My assumptions were correct, yet the avant-garde design of the memorial was bitterly divisive, requiring aggressive and deft moves in the rough and tumble world of the media and national politics.
This dramatic ideological battle was well captured by James Reston in his recent book A Rift in the Earth.
All ended well.
A new wall is dividing Americans in profound ways. There is bitterness, rudeness, and anger in the body politic today. Americans debate with vigor many issues. Channel surf CNN and FOX News for a couple of hours to experience America’s ideological divide as each works to stoke the fires.
I can’t exactly build another wall to tear down the current rancor. Yet I am reminded of the 1970s, when bombs went off in the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon. Hundreds of thousands protested with vigor and anger at the political establishment over continued warfare in Asia. There was talk of a “generation gap” unlike anything we see today.
Just as we have been divided in the recent past, so too are we divided today. Where do we go from here? How bad is it? I submit that public discord has been far worse in the recent past, particularly during the efforts in Vietnam, and, of course, during the Civil War from 1861 to 1865.
Here is my advice: Go to places where Americans gather. Go to a baseball game, for example. Observe your fellow citizens. Americans are often spirited and loud, but friendly and somehow get along just fine. They are quick to help a stranger in distress. The nation is seemingly always in political distress. We argue a lot. We have a lot of brave heroes fighting terror. And over 58,000 engraved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
The USA has been doing some things right for over 200 hundred years. After all, folks are going to great lengths to make America their new home!
Jan Craig Scruggs, a decorated Vietnam veteran, currently serves as a senior adviser helping to raise over a million dollars for the Global War on Terror Memorial. He also chairs the National Appeals Board for the Selective Service.
